207 Doctrines: Psychology
is approaching the Epicurean distinction of the mind from the senses. These
questions are unanswerable, and the fact of their unanswerability prompts
the further unanswerable question whether their unanswerability is due to
the undeveloped nature of the theory, or merely to the fragmentary state of
the evidence which has come down to us.
If we take seriously the atomists' view of the soul as a fine structure
of spherical atoms permeating the entire body, we should expect the eidola
emitted by living things themselves to contain soul-atoms, and hence
themselves to be alive. It might be objected35 that eidola flow from the
surfaces of bodies, whereas the soul is internal, but it is precisely the latter
claim which the picture of the soul as permeating the whole body is designed
to refute. 36 After all, the soul is what accounts for perception (106a), and
the whole of the surface of the body (i.e., the skin) is a sense-organ. Indeed,
if we take literally the claim recorded by Lucretius (HOf) that soul- and
body-atoms are arranged alternately, precisely half the atoms constituting
the external surface of the human body are soul-atoms (and presumably the
same goes for other animal species too). It follows that half the atoms which
make up each eidolon emitted by an animal must be soul-atoms, and hence
that eidola of living things are themselves alive.
That that was indeed the teaching of Democritus is suggested by evidence
from two related areas, his account of dreams and his theology. In general,
the occurrence of dreams is explained by the theory of eidola; dreaming is
essentially imagination occurring during sleep, and like waking imagination
is explained by the impact of stray eidola (132-3), originally, of course,
emitted by real things, but frequently distorted by collisions with one
another (131b). The evidence that some dream eidola are alive comes from
the two passages from Plutarch cited as 133a and b. The first of these
reports that dream images represent not merely physical features, but also
psychological states such as desires and feelings 'and when ... they collide
with people they talk as if they were alive, and tell those who receive them
the opinions, words and actions of those who emitted them/ By itself, of
course, this does not require that the images should themselves be alive, any
more than the images on a cinema screen, but merely that they represent
the behaviour, including the speech and movements, of living beings. They
might be said to talk in the same sense as 'talking' films, 'as if they were
alive/ which might well be taken to imply that they are not alive.37133b, on
the other hand, makes it pretty clear that Democritus' view was that at least
35 Sassi 69 makes this objection, pp. 74â&#x20AC;&#x201D;5.
36 See Bicknell 60.
37 So Barnes 7, ch. 21 (c).